Hendrik N. Poinar

Hendrik Nicholas Poinar (born May 31, 1969 in D.C, United States) is an evolutionary biologist specializing in ancient DNA. Poinar first became known for extracting DNA sequences from ground sloth coprolites. He is currently director of the Ancient DNA Centre at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

Education and academic career The son of noted entomologist George Poinar Jr. and Eva Hecht-Poinar, Poinar received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo in 1992 and 1999 respectively before earning a Ph.D. in 1999 from LMU Munich, after which he was a postdoctoral researcher from 2000 to 2003 at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

In 2003, Poinar and others from the Max Planck Institute published genetic sequences isolated from coprolites of the extinct Shasta giant ground sloth,

In September 2008, Poinar's laboratory published results showing that after a long period of separation in the mammoth populations of Siberia and North America, the Siberian mammoth population had been completely replaced by mammoths of North American origin.

In 2014, Poinar and colleagues published the first genomic data from victims of the Plague of Justinian in Bavaria, demonstrating that this plague was caused by a strain of Yersinia pestis now extinct.